Hello Dreamwidth! First off: thanks to everyone who gave me a hand with the internet hell problems last time; the escalated executive customer service team did finally get the issues resolved. Secondly, I wish to announce that after, oh, two months of living in this house, we have finally set up the office so it is no longer a bunch of random boxes with a slowly-falling-apart kitchen table being used as a temporary desk. (Now I have my good old folding card table being used as a desk. No, really, it's an improvement, I swear.)

So, I am here to bring you this week's Dreamwidth News, now from my once-more-hooked-up spiffy awesome 28" monitor. Hopefully this will mean less shoulder and neck strain now that I am not hunched over my laptop screen.

A reminder: this week is Dreamwidth open account creation week! From now until 28 February, creating an account won't require an invite code. So, if you have anyone you know who's been unable to find a DW invite, this is the week to create an account! Welcome to everyone who's joined us so far. We hope you'll like your new home.

...I totally would have finished this update yesterday, except I slept through it. Yes, all of yesterday. I don't want to talk about it.

Development

* Improvements to the Find Users with Similar Interests page: deleted accounts and accounts you're already subscribed to won't show up, and the page will be split by account type (personal accounts/OpenID accounts/community accounts).

* Massive improvements to our outgoing Atom feeds to make them compliant with newer versions of the protocol. (You won't notice this unless you use a feedreader to read Dreamwidth journals, but it was well overdue for an upgrade.)

* Fixing a bug that was preventing the crosspost footer on the Account Settings page from displaying properly. (It still worked, it just didn't show the variables properly.)

* Allowing people to customize the text of the Crossposts: metadata that shows when you've chosen to display where else an entry has been posted.

* Adding a visual indication when you've marked an inbox notification as 'read'.

* Changing the inbox so that when you interact with an item (by hitting 'reply'), it won't open in a new window.

* Expanding the "Custom CSS" text box on the Customize Style page, to give you more room to work in.

* Making it so that when you create a new feed account on Dreamwidth (as opposed to adding a feed account that's already been created), your reading page won't get spammed with every single entry in the feed. (Only the three latest entries from the feed will show on your reading page.)

As always, these improvements won't be live until the next code push. Watch dw_maintenance for details.

Suggestions Bug Bounty

If you check out the code tour, you'll see that many of the past two weeks' development efforts have been from things suggested by you all through our Make a Suggestion page. This is because the second anniversary of Dreamwidth's open beta is coming up at the end of April, and we're looking to give y'all as many presents as possible to celebrate!

From now until the end of March, that means we're placing a development bounty on bugs that were opened from suggestions, during our March Suggestions Hackathon. Anyone is eligible and there are lots of little things to work on, so if you've been thinking about getting into Dreamwidth development work, now's the time!

Design Poll

Recently we've done a bunch of backend work to make it possible for both your "All Icons" page and your Profile page to display in your journal layout. As we start doing the frontend, there are a lot of decisions we need to make, and as always, we want to do it in the way that y'all find most useful. (Or at least "least annoying".)

Location, Location, Location

A recent suggestion asked for us to stop linking the "Current Location" metadata on entries to the Google Maps for that location. (To be precise, it asked for an option -- which we are very reluctant to do except for critically important things, which I don't think this qualifies as.) I honestly don't care either way, and the suggestion seemed to be fairly popular, but before we make the change, I figured I'd toss it to a wider audience: does anyone use or rely upon that linking and would seriously miss it if it disappeared?

Embedding Stuff

A recent code push made it possible for us to define "safe embedding sites" -- sites for which the <embed> tag will work and not be cleaned out. We need to specifically whitelist these sites because the embed tag has the potential to introduce Very Nasty Stuff, risking the security of your journal and the journals of anyone who views your journal.

So, we thought we'd poll you for 'safe' embedding sites that you'd want to use. Obviously, YouTube is on the top of the list, and people have also requested Vimeo, but what else should be allowed?

Nifty Mood Theme Tool

Have you wanted to take advantage of the paid account benefit of creating your own mood theme but been stymied by the ... less-than-usable mood theme editor? (Believe me, fixing it up is On Our List.) Check out the mood theme sharing tool created by one of our users -- it might ease the pain.

Comment Cleaning, Redux

Last update, I discussed some changes to the HTML/CSS allowed in comments, being made to strip out a whole bunch of annoyance exploits being used to break pages and cause grief by spammers and people with too much time on their hands. After some discussion in the comments, and since the majority of the people who are using these techniques are anonymous commenters, we've decided to make the changes only apply to anonymous commenting for now. We may need to re-visit this decision if it becomes more of an issue in the future, but for now you shouldn't notice any changes.

Sad News

This week, we are saddened to announce that we've lost a member of the Dreamwidth family. hippyjolteon passed away suddenly. We are made less by the loss.

*

That's it from us for another week! As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion.

We'll see you next week for our next update. If I don't sleep through it again.

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I like the Google Maps linking feature, but I don't rely on it; I think the site as a whole might be better served by figuring out how to allow Google Maps embeds in the entry proper, and ditching the location-linking.

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I wonder how feasible or safe it'd be to allow embedding of Plurk or Twitter, or another social media microblogging format. There are times when I'd love to make Dreamwidth a hub of all social media, and other times where I go "That's completely unrealistic!"

Still, food for thought.

I don't care too much about the Current Location changes either way. The only changes I'm watching with a weary eye are the profile and icon page customization changes. Those actually kind of scare me. You can do some pretty crazy things with customization that could break the crap out of those pages. It might sound weird, but I like seeing Dreamwidth on the site somewhere. I'm not sure about what sort of level of customization we're talking about, but I'll probably cling to the site scheme on those pages. Otherwise, I don't go to www.dreamwidth.org much (It doesn't have a lot of functionality for me..), and everything else is my own journal or my circle.

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Hi! I got notice from you that my paid account, that a friend of mine gifted me with, will expire in two weeks. Now my problem... I live in Europe, I have no credit card. So I wanted to know if there is any chance that you go back to paying with PayPal?

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I saw somebody on my droll using Dotsub earlier this week, so maybe that would be a useful one to whitelist as well? It appears to be useful for subtitling videos and allowing for multiple translations of those subtitles, but I have to admit I don't know a lot about it - I'm getting an accessibility "vibe" but not sure how true that proves to be in practice.

Oh, right, and Flickr! Seeing as I just embedded a video from there earlier this week ...

As for the location thing, I am mongoose - I think most of my friends who do use it use it in ways that Google can't translate into an actual set of coordinates, so I wouldn't mind the link going away, though sometimes it's amusing to click and see where Google thinks "running late" is, f'rex.

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Only the three latest entries from the feed will show on your reading page.

+1,000,000. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THAAAANK YOU. I've wanted to create some feeds and have been terrified that my reading list is going to be borked up with epic amounts of posts. \o/

Also re: the Google Maps linking feature... I actually dislike that linking, as most of the people I know put something like "the office" or "my dungeon" or whatever for Current Location, as would I, but it comes with that weird little link that doesn't go anywhere unless you put in an actual physical location, which most people don't do as far as I've seen. So yeah, I'd like to see the Google Maps link disappear if possible. It's not something I'm vehement about, but it would be nice. :3

Comedy Central, because I believe people deserve to be able to embed those Daily Show clips that I can't watch without spending half an hour hunting them down on The Comedy Network (which doesn't seem to support embedding that I can see.)

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Oh hooray, so excited to hear this about the comment cleaning redux! I was sad to see the changes in the previous news post because a lot of them were things I use in comments. So this brings me much joy. ♥

Ooooh, curious, will whitelisting certain sites for the embed tag allow videos from those sites to be embedded in comments as well too? I know that no video embedding works in comments atm still, right? *crosses fingers and hopes* :D :D

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I'm OK with making the GMaps linking optional, or making the location field itself optional. I use it; sometimes with a real location, sometimes not. I totally understand people who don't use it not wanting to be bothered by it. I just wouldn't want to see it completely eliminated, for those of us who don't mind it.

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I actually don't bother to use the Location feature at all, specifically because of the auto-link. I'd want to put in things like, "at work", "at home", or whatever else, and those wind up being totally useless map links.

What I'd really is the ability to set up a few standard locations in my profile, where I'd have the text "work" but have the Google Maps link show the actual location of my workplace. I doubt that would be popular enough to justify the amount of development effort it'd take, though.

If there were no more auto-linking, I might start using the Location field.

Embedding

I would love to be able to embed two particular things: widgets from Plurk, and videos from Nico Nico Douga (Japan's Youtube, basically). I don't know if it's anything like embedding videos from Youtube, but their embed code looks like this, for example:

Embedding

How about this as an off the wall suggestion for embedding--LJ polls in an iframe with a noscheme display so you just get the poll.

Been meaning to suggest it for ages, but I've a few friends who post their polls there not here, and some way of them also showing here would work well for me. It'd also help for when you crosspost a community poll to a personal journal post, etc.

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I am so torn on the idea of displaying profile pages and icon pages in journal styles. On the one hand, it would look nice and it would solve the problem of coding that works just fine in entries (even site-schemed entries!) breaking when I try to put it on a profile. On the other hand... :|a

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Yeah, I'm iffy on the profile thing, too. I like the profile/icon pages as standardized pages because then there isn't some neon-green-flashing-background, and I can find what I want to find easily and quickly.

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I dunno, if you look at my posts I use the location thingy on google maps on my entries with almost every single one. I move a LOT due to my husband's line of work, so I find the feature very very useful and important to how I use the site. I'm sure I can get along without it... but it sucks to have something I'm used to using and enjoy taken away.

I'd like to see maybe an option in the user settings to allow the location to display as a link or as plaintext like "mood" and "music" fields are displayed.

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Making it so that when you create a new feed account on Dreamwidth (as opposed to adding a feed account that's already been created), your reading page won't get spammed with every single entry in the feed.

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I'm so sorry for your loss! It sounds kinda cheesy, but I really do feel like the DW userbase is my extended family in a way, and it always makes me feel awful whenever we lose someone. May you remember your friend with joy.